Talk:Relayer

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[edit] Review Sept 7, 2006

7/10 This is a good article, with reliable and reasonably full information on the circumstances of the album, and on the 2003 remaster. I've known and loved this album for many years, still the point that some LP editions had a three-plate "double gatefold" sleeve (like Going For The One) was new to me, and I've never seen the two panel paintings reproduced here, they're not included on the cd either. I think that was a minor part of the early LP editions: every LP copy I've seen is a simple foldout: still that makes a dramatic effect when you first see the knights and then, folding out the full width, get to see the python snakes among the rocks.

Roger Dean has said that although he hadn't heard the music in anything like a finished state before doing the cover art, and the extant covr wasn't his first idea, he felt the cover painting fit like a glove; he cites it as one of his favourites among all his Yes cover packages. I definitely agree: there's a symbolic link between the music, the Gates lyrics and the cover art.

On the minus side, I think the entry could include some more discuussion of the character of the music and its significance - this is a highly unusual album, and still one of Yes' most unified. This could at some points be in conflict with the non-POV, non-subjective policy of Wikipedia (at least the English Wikipedia) buut I feel it's hard to write anything interesting or valuable about rock music if one does not allow some scope for subjective appraisal, and handbooks etc in clasical music go subjective all the time. though in a slightly shielded way. Strausszek September 7, 21:09 (EST)

Is there a link to this Shakira commercial with Relayer as her shirt? - unsigned comment by 69.21.146.227 on 01:15, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I tried doing a Google search and all I could find were a few unsubstantiated rumours on progressive rock messageboards and mirrors of Wikipedia.--HisSpaceResearch 02:15, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I have that photo myself, think I got it from the yes-fr group on Yahoo, but can't find it online. The cover has apparently been printed on the tee before knitting it: it's not just the cover as a square printed in the middle of the cloth as usual in such cases, but the tailor has cut and fit a large print to the curves of Shakira.

[edit] Year or Month-Year no day

These dates are always rendered without wikilinking. Fantailfan 23:25, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Appraisal quotes needed

It's not hard to find Yes fans who would aagree this is one of the most underrated albums the band ever did. I'm one of them, posted a review on Amazon weeks after the remaster came out which includes some discussion of Gates. Trouble is, I'm not a pro critic ;-) but my text still makes, I think, a lucid effort to bring out the musical quality as well as the political/cultural significance of Gates of Delirium. I felt this was a great album from the moment I heard it in the eighties, but it also seemed different and hard to pinpoint in terms of style (today I wouldn't hesitate to say that it presaged bands like SPK, The Swans, Dead Can Dance or even Nick Cave's majestic first album by several years - there's definitely a community of vision and in some points of style). Bill Martin (The music of Yes) and others have also discussed Gates as a moral and political statement; there's a link backwards to Yours Is No Disgrace, which was essentially about war as it is seen by the agents/armies involved, and of the debilitating and brutalizing spiral effects of modern warfare. Strausszek September 7, 2006 16:10 (EST)

You won't find many. I liked it, too, because it was better than Top. (I've since reversed my opinion.) But that was faint praise in 1974, as most professional critics had already written off Yes as completely bloated and over the top by then. Even more than ELP, which had the grace to disappear for a few years at that time.
Anyway, if I had been Cameron Crowe and writing reviews at age 13, I could have been published. Fantailfan 17:37, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I read the article on TFTO this afternoon - it's been changed between polar opposites, at first it stated bluntly that critics and kids alike hated the album and its major significance lay in the fact that it triggered the spirit of '77 in Britain (this is very questionable, as was pointed out: Joe Strummer, Jello Biafra or Billy Idol never cared about Yes, the band were invoked later as an excuse). Later on, it seems there came a re-edit which was a fan's POV - very positive, and now it's somehow more restrained but also gives little idea of why it's an album that matters, and to some people that article's still too subjective. This sort of highlights a problem with the non-POV, non-original judgment policy of Wikipedia. Most handbooks in the history of literature are not "objective and unbiased" in the sense that they only report plain facts and established truth - they build on some values and a bunch of traditions and the good ones have a conscious relation to these traditions; they go beyond the objectively "true" sometimes. With classical music or modern "art music" (Berio, Messiaen, Philip Glass, etc) it's the same: there's a body of reflection, practice and criticism that frames discussion of the art.

Of course rock music doesn't have that much of a body of written, high-level criticism to relate to, so with many acts you won't find anything very interesting that's undisputed and printed in books. I see the point of making Wikipedia reliable, but I don't really see the point of achieving a duplicate Britannica (in principle at least) when so many encyclopaedias are going online and others are on paper in the public library; on some angles, there has to be a space for showing subjective judgment and expounding what the individual writer finds interesting about an artist, a genre or an album. Strausszek September 7, 2006 20:35 (EST)

Blaming punk on Yes is stretching it, at best. Yes and Johnny Rotten appealed to different demographic groups - the first carried their demographic along (20-25, I would say) while the latter went after the most lucrative market. The target demographic for popular music (kind of in flux in 1974 but a little later briefly punk, then metal and now rap) is teenaged boys. That's the way it always has been and always will be.
Anyway, on the article, it takes strong (and incorrect) statements and puts "perhaps", "argubly, "maybe" in front of them. For some reason, it works as a good device for rebutting contemporary criticism lobbed at the album.
Why we're talking about Top at Relayer is unclear.Fantailfan 20:37, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I guess, because the albums came right after each other and both have become bywords of prog excess - phrases like "the point when Rick Wakeman left Yes" have even become critical panning shortcuts in themselves, when the talk is about recent bands, they don't even need to be prog bands It looks plain we're both into prog and 70s music, me into jazz, classical and electronica too. A private message box isn't part of the Wiki user package, but if you'd like to, just send me a mail through my talk page and you'll get my address back.

all the best Strausszek September 7, 2006 23:46 (CST)

I can see this needs some source noptes and so on, will be back in days to fix that. Strausszek September 16, 2006 12:50 (CEST)


[edit] Best Album?

Someone put a rather blatant NPOV violation on here by saying it is the "best" Yes album. Personally, Relayer is probably among my favorites, but that's a very subjective claim and doesn't belong here. Locrian 22:10, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

It's my favourite Yes album too, but of course that's not NPOV. In the meantime, anyone interested in making this a featured article?--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 10:41, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Possible Source for Pepsi Ad

http://www.amazon.com/Yes-Tee-shirt-Relayer-Charcoal/dp/B000VDPGPU This item states "The cover art was first worn on a t-shirt by Shakira for a Pepsi commercial." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.42.116.9 (talk) 06:14, 25 October 2007 (UTC)